


Lose Some, Win Some

by fragrantwoods



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M, First Time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-19
Updated: 2014-02-19
Packaged: 2018-01-13 00:33:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1206238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fragrantwoods/pseuds/fragrantwoods
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Summary: Baltar's in office and Laura's out of Colonial One. She just needs a place to stay for a little while until she moves down to the surface, and she's so familiar with the Admiral's quarters...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lose Some, Win Some

The first thing he notices is her boots. Bulky, thick, and nothing like the businesslike pumps he’d gotten used to seeing on her feet—then discarded on the deck of his quarters as soon as she would settle onto his couch, during what he was already thinking of as “the old days.”

She looks smaller today.

The presidential carapace she’d worn since her swearing in has been set aside, and he sees now that it had given her an illusion of height and mass, even when she was weakened and sleepy in her Colonial One cot. Even when she lay dying in sick bay. The first cracks began when they talked about the election; the final shatter happened as soon as the priest finished with Baltar.

He wondered if he could get used to calling her something other than “Madame President.”  
Her first name is permanently linked in his mind with deep green ferns and silvery rain, tarps and sweaters and camo fatigues. And the memory of anger, mixed with bone-deep pain in his chest.

And forgiveness, whether she wanted it or not.

The anger is gone, mostly (although he’s not sure if the residual anger is at her election-rigging or that it failed) but his chest aches at the sight of her. There have been other times, he’s sure, but right now, calling her “Laura” just hurts. She’s a civilian, a settler, and she’s leaving him behind. She’s dressed for wrangling with children and chalk, and it burns that she’s chosen to go where he can’t.

“It’s just for a couple of days, Bill. If you’d rather I find someplace else…” She looks at him over the boxes in her arms, piled almost up to her eyes.

He shakes off the ache and remembers who he is, who they are to each other. What they’ve been through together. He tells himself to stop being a selfish bastard and takes the boxes out of her arms.

“Not at all, Laura. I’m just--” He looks around for a place to set the pile of her personal belongings. He tells himself he just wants his quarters to not be too cluttered as he puts them by the foot of his rack.

“You look so different,” he finishes, and he has a hard time making eye contact again as he straightens. He wants to drink in the sight of her loosely waving hair, the flush in her cheeks, the swell of her breasts under the loose sweater. She looks as good, even better than she did on Kobol. And now, they’ve both healed from the damage they’d carried then.

“So do you.” Her eyes twinkle and he glances down at his usual duty blues. Nothing’s changed that he can see. He meets her eyes again.

“You don’t look like Admiral Adama, military arm of the government, right now.” She moves closer, places her hand on his chest in a call-back to the one time they kissed, and he wonders if she’s mimicking that moment on purpose. “You still are, of course, but not so much to me anymore. You feel more like ‘Bill.’

She’s standing close but not pressing against him, just her one hand, and he senses she’s balanced between leaning into him or backing away, whatever he wants her to do.

For a second he wants her to turn and walk out the hatch, or to ask where blankets are for the couch, anything to shut his feelings down. She’s leaving and he’s staying and they’re too old for shore leave romance. The over-eager hellos, the wistful goodbyes, the lustful anticipation that will have him jerking off in the shower thinking about the last time, the next time.

He’s still telling himself it’s a bad idea when his lips brush hers.

She’d been so weak before. Now she’s strong and healthy, Cylon-healthy, and he shivers when she grabs a fistful of his hair, her nails scratching against the nape of his neck, and pulls him hard against her. Her mouth opens against his and it’s everything their first kiss didn’t get a chance to be.

He’s almost forgotten how this works—in the past ten years he’s frakked more women than he’s kissed like this. Her tongue darts between his lips and it all comes back, the taste, the incongruous mix of rough and smooth, teeth scraping against sensitive flesh, the urge to touch as much of her as he can.

He shoots a glance at the hatch. Satisfied it’s locked, he closes his eyes and slips his hands under her oversized sweater. The bare skin of her lower back is warm and silky, and the feel of it goes right to his cock. She can tell, he realizes, as he feels the chuckle deep in her throat.

She wiggles just a little bit against him, and whatever he thought this might have been when it started—a last embrace, a goodbye kiss—it’s foreplay now.

It’s foreplay and they’re going to make love before either one of them walks back through that hatch. He’s almost angry that she’s so willing to do this. It’s going to make their parting so much harder, make it hurt that much more to be away from each other.

Their combined heat blasts away his anger as soon as her nimble fingers slip under the collar of his tunic to stroke the side of his neck. He’ll worry about the pain later. After he finally fraks Laura Roslin like he’s wanted to for months.

 

************************************

 

This is wrong, Laura thinks. It’s wrong, and she knew it was wrong when she walked through his hatch. When she got dressed that morning. When she decided to be alone with him on the eve of her leaving.

She doesn’t care, not enough to stop. She’s thought about this when she was too sick to move. When he held her hand and she couldn’t even open her eyes to see him one last time. Before she fell asleep in sick bay, each time thinking _this is it, this is the time I won’t wake up,_ she’d count her missed chances with him.

On Kobol.

In her quarters.

After a hundred dry meetings and contentious debates.

Maybe even in the brig, and that thought never fails to make her smile.

She’s thought about it a lot, since her cure. His one quick kiss that had turned wonderfully slow had been delicious. It had been enough to make her forget about cancer for a minute or two.

What would it be like, to kiss him, touch him, when she was healthy, better than healthy, feeling sensations she hadn’t felt in a long time?

She’d blushed when Cottle tested her blood for hormones. Don’t tell me I’m going to get a period again, she’d joked.

He didn’t mention the possibility of anything else. That she might have regained fertility. That she might be at risk for…she hadn’t been able to finish that thought. No one got pregnant from their own hand, or from dreams so vivid she woke up wet and aching, halfway to orgasm.

And there were so many barriers to starting something with Bill Adama. Stupid, cruel, unreasonable barriers.

When Cottle had told her nothing had kick-started her eggs, she was free to do…whatever, he hadn’t looked at her, he’d kept his eyes on his cigarette. She’d given him a dry “I’ll keep that in mind,” keeping it light, making a joke of it.

She’d gotten off ten minutes later, as soon as she was alone in her quarters, thinking about how Bill had smelled, how his arms felt around her when they’d danced. Thinking about his hands…big, warm...and skilled.

She knew they’d be skilled.

It had been the one bright spot of losing the election. For a few hours, she’d let herself fall into a daydream at the edges of conscious thought: they’d be lovers, she’d move into his quarters, he’d get out of his rack long enough to command the fleet, carry out his duties, then he’d come back to her, smiling and hard and ready to frak her again.

In her daydreams, she didn’t even get fully dressed, while she read and showered and wrote out her memoirs or poetry or whatever erotic musings came to mind. It was selfish and blissful and everything was her way.

It had been a lovely daydream, while it lasted.

Within twenty-four hours, she’d started scanning lists of settlers, ages of children, and wondering what it would take to get to get a functioning school up and running.

_Who_ it would take, to get a school running.

And that settled that. There was a scant handful of teachers and no administrators available to the settlers. Except for her.

She had to go.

And he had to stay.

It was never going to be like it had been…the daily contact, the passion of leading together even when they were glaring and biting words at each other, the final hours of what passed for the day spent curled up on his couch with him, easy as an old married couple.

But she could make it be something more. He’d wait for a sign, she knew. She’d have to make the first move. Let him know frakking her was okay.

Frakking and letting her leave was okay.

She’d planned for this all day, dabbing the last drops of perfume she’d probably ever wear behind her ears, between her breasts, at the pulse points where her thighs joined her body. One final hint over her pubis, too high, she hoped, to irritate his tongue.

He’d been the old Bill Adama for a minute, when she walked in with her couple of boxes. Stiff, formal…and then the boxes were stowed and her hand was over his heart, feeling the beat of him through the blue wool.

It had been enough.

 

************************************

 

She’s right about his hands.

She’s unsure about her breasts, the one having felt so alien for so long. She’s seen his covert glances at her cleavage for months now. He likes them well enough. She’s just not sure if she still does.

Maybe it’s the Cylon blood or maybe he’s just that good. His caresses are eager and almost too rough as he touches her through the fabric and lace of her bra. Then he pushes up under the cloth, and he’s easy and gentle, and his hand is so, so warm.

His fingers form a luscious pattern of sensation and it’s as good as it ever was, even better. He goes from one to the other and it’s the best proof of all that she’s cured, the responsiveness he brings to her left breast. When he sucks on her tongue and lightly pinches her nipple, a circuit is completed, and her clit throbs, her back arches.

If they don’t get naked soon, she’s going to embarrass herself, rub up against his thigh until she comes against him, dry-humping him like a horny co-ed.

She wants a better memory than that.

He’s groaning into her neck, pulling her sweater out of the way until she’s afraid it’ll rip. They’re speaking in a language all their own, grunts and half-words and soft exhaled moans as they unbuckle and unsnap and unhook their way to each other. She fumbles with her boots, leaning against him awkwardly, him chuckling while she yanks off one, then the other.

“We should’ve done this when you were in a skirt and pumps,” he teases, as her boots go flying.

It brings her up short, and tears prickle at the corners of her eyes.

“You’re right, we should have.”

His dark blue gaze is hot enough to dry her beginning tears, scorching her for a second before it softens into the warmth she’s come to count on.

“We’re here now,” he tells her. His lips are at her temples, brushing over her eyelids, light sultry touches until their lips meet again and she loses herself in the taste of him, the way his body feels under her hands. His bare chest under his tanks, the ridged scar between his nipples…she wants to memorize every sensation, burn him into her fingertips.

Her khaki trousers are halfway to her ankles when he starts lowering his shorts and she tries to remember exactly when his pants had come off, when he had toed off his boots.

Reconstructing this can wait for her first lonely night on New Caprica, she tells herself as she bats his hands away from his waistband.

“Laura, wait—“

It’s not much of a protest.

“No. Let me,” she says, shoving his shorts down until his cock springs free of the fabric. She was going to let him take it from there while she sheds the last of her clothes and he finishes undressing. She tells herself she just wants to do the initial unveiling. Then they can gracefully come together, finish what they started. Maybe they’ll move over on his rack, or maybe the couch.

She hadn’t expected the beauty of him. The thick hair at the base of his belly, the scattering of light freckles over the smooth skin above. The thickness, the slight trembling of his cock as his thighs twitch, the first pearl of pre-cum she’s seen in ages shivering right at the tip.

She’s on her knees before she thinks about what she’s doing, drawing him into her mouth.

_I should ask, we should talk about this, I should wait_ …and then the salty sharp taste of him is on her tongue and she’s losing herself between his thighs, barely registering his fingers sinking into her hair.

Her lungs fill with his scent: shipboard soap, male musk, well-worn wool. She wants to remember this, wants to capture the smell of him to play back when he’s thousands of miles away from her.

His fingers tighten against her scalp, and he moves his hips back with a regretful moan, pulling himself out of her mouth. She waits for a protest, an explanation, but he’s silent as he hooks his fingers under her arms and pulls her up, his thumbs pressing into the soft sides of her breasts.

She’s naked from the knees up, her sweater and bra in a jumbled pile behind her. A second after he presses his bare foot down against her pants, she’s picking up her right foot, then her left, and for a moment they’re dancing again, and he holds her tight as she giggles and shimmies all the way out of her last scraps of clothes.

They’re finally naked, skin to skin, and it should be hot and dirty with imminent frakking. Instead it’s sweet and joyful, and he’s grinning in that way he has that shows all his slightly crooked white teeth, the smile that takes years off his age and shows the young man still within.

He’s so happy right now, it blasts away the death and loss, the fear and unspeakable horrors they’ve both gone through. “You’re beautiful when you’re naked,” he tells her, and makes some self-deprecating remark about his age that she misses because she’s wrapping her arms around him, then her leg, and covering his mouth again, kissing deep.

If the taste of himself on her lips bothers him, he doesn’t let it show.

Laura surprises herself, making a sound between a sob and a squeal when he picks her up, hands broad and splayed across her bottom.

He’s better than she’d dreamed, and they’ve only just started.

 

******************************************************

 

He wants this to be perfect. He wishes he had more practice, that it hadn’t been so long since he’s gone down on a woman. Then he’s kissing down her belly and learning the taste and incredible softness of her slick folds while she’s grabbing the shelf over his rack. Her whimpering urging is all the guidance he needs; even if he’d never done this before in his life, her response would be enough to show him how.

She likes two fingers deep inside her, she likes his open lips surrounding her clit, sucking, quick flicks of his tongue providing a counterpoint. He files everything away in his mind; he wants to re-enact this when he visits her on New Caprica. In a narrow cot, out in the open air, under the stars...her thighs start to shake and she moves against him, keening, gasping, then she's having her first orgasm under his touch. He grips her thighs harder than he should as she bucks against him and twists her fingers into his hair. She’ll have bruises in the shape of his fingertips by tomorrow.

When she walks away from him, when she sets foot on New Caprica, her flesh will carry his marks.

It’s only fair, he thinks. She’s giving him a heart-aching smile, looking at him under half-closed lids in her post-orgasmic high, and it’s bruising his soul, leaving her mark on him as well.

He gives himself a second to admire the look of her, splayed out and open, her lean belly, the pale golden swell of her breasts. The tumbled sweep of red hair, a few sweat-damp strands clinging to her cheek. She’s beautiful and she wants him, he can see it, he can still taste how much she wants him.

His cock is so hard it hurts, and she’s gripping his shoulders, pulling him into her, telling him _hurry, please, Bill, frak me, now_ and it’s more than he can take. He meant to enter her slow, easy, giving her time to adjust to him (he’s heard that particular request since he lost his cherry, a million years ago), but she’s got a wild look in her eyes he’s never seen and they’ve waited so long…. He knows it’s his last “first time” and he drives in deep, comes in hot.

Somewhere in her moans and bit-back screams, he hears “yes” over and over. This is how she wants it, too.

Later, he thinks, he’ll lie on his back, and she’ll ride him however she likes.

He’ll sit naked on the side of her cot, feel her sinking down onto him, her legs around his waist.

Later, she’ll lean against a tree, or bend over a sandbag, or brace herself against a tent pole, look over her shoulder, and, ass swaying, ask him to frak her like that.

For now, it’s enough that she moves her hips with his, that she scores the skin of his back with her nails, that she sucks against his neck as he fraks her hard.

He slows to reach between them, to circle her clit with his fingers, and the pink flush blooming over her chest enchants him. Her eyes are closed until her belly tightens, then they open and it’s almost too much for him to take. Her muscles clench against him, pulling at him, and he only has enough time to marvel at her coming again so easily before waves of sensation hit him. He comes with every cell of his body, his spine is melting and everything he is flows into her, and it’s unimaginably sweet.

He finishes with his face pressed into her neck, and he thinks half-jointed thoughts about quitting, giving command over to somebody, anybody, so he can stay with her. This is what he wants. Just this, just her.

Sweat and tears mingle on their skin, and aftershocks ripple through them both. They whisper fragments of sentences over each other: _that was / you were / you know what I mean / I like hearing you say it / we should have / why didn’t we / everything I dreamed it would be / I never thought / you’re perfect / so are you._

They shift and nudge each other as they find a comfortable way to lie together in the narrow rack. Just for a minute, he says. Just a minute, she echoes, before they fall in a light and sudden sleep.

 

**********************************

 

There’s no dawn in space. It still feels like it, though, to Laura, as she untangles herself from his arms. His soft snores are music to her ears as she fumbles around for her clothes. She wants to remember this: the sounds, the smells, the tastes of them together.

She starts to dress in the dim lighting--old habits die hard. She’s always the first one up. The first to leave. Then the square shape by the foot of the rack catches her eye.

Her belongings, all boxed up.

This is home, for now. For the next two days. She has nowhere to go, really. At least, nowhere she wants to go.

And she has no duties, no job at the moment. Her daydreams swirl in her head, making her smile. She’s earned this. They both have.

He’s stretched out, one arm flung over his head, and his lips curve up a little as he sleeps.

She takes off the socks and panties she’s just put on and slips back under the covers. She leans over to kiss his ear too softly for him to feel it, and whispers a low “I love you, Bill,” that’s not much more than her lips forming the words.

His eyes open enough to show their twinkle, even in the dimness. “Love you, too,” he says, turning and pulling her into his arms, her back to his chest, and settles them tight against each other, a perfect fit. She would have thought his arm would be too thick, too heavy to be comfortable draped over her shoulder, but it rests there like he’s part of her.

A little more sleep would be nice, she thinks, and nestles even closer. It’s what she’s dreamed of...time, and him.

_Them._

She can feel a light doze coming back to her, his breath warm on the back of her neck.

She thinks about where she’ll ask for her tent to be put up. Not too close to the others.

It should have a sturdy, durable cot.

She’s got some jewelry still, sparkly remnants of _Before_. Maybe she can barter for a red outfit she saw one of the Scorpian women making last week. He’d like that.

Laura falls asleep again, and dreams of the reunions waiting for them on New Caprica.


End file.
